


Grief and Comfort

by Starculler



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Post Season 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-13
Updated: 2017-03-13
Packaged: 2018-10-03 23:25:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10261364
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Starculler/pseuds/Starculler
Summary: Shiro's gone ... again. Disappeared from his seat in the Black lion and only his bayard left behind. A week crawls slowly by, panic and grief saturating the castle's air, and Lance feels restless. Doesn't know what to do with himself. He decides to help, but there's only so much he can do before denial catches up to him.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Shout out to tumblr user ravenclawsidiot for giving me feedback on my draft. You're the best!
> 
> I hope you guys enjoy this little bit of Langst.  
> I'm so sorry for the basic title though.

The room is dark when Lance manages to get the door open. He peers in, hand gripping the frame for balance, his fingers a bloodless yellow-white from pressing too hard into the metal. He frowns when, after scanning the shadows, Keith is nowhere to be found. He pulls away, hears the door _whoosh_ softly closed as he trudges down the castle’s empty corridor. Every so often he glances up from watching his feet to look through the rooms he passes, but moves on when he finds that Keith isn’t in any of them either.

He hesitates when the corridor splits in front of him, considers heading back to his room but at the last moment decides to take a detour. Walking, he figures as he veers left, might help ease the tightness in his chest and the queasy feeling building in his stomach. He’s not sure how long he walks, but he ends up in front of a room in one of the lesser used corridors that he’s never entered before. He teeters forward and back in front of the door, alternating between leaning on the balls of his feet and his heels, before deciding to walk in. The door whooshes open and closed behind him as he heads toward the center of the bare room.

There are little indents at regular intervals along the edges, near where the floor meets the walls. He thinks they might be something stored beneath the floor, but doesn’t give it anymore thought. Instead, he heads for the dip in the center of the room, a ring like a single stair-step. He sits there, like it’s some shallow stoop, with his elbows on his knees and his face propped up on one hand. It’s not comfortable, but it’s not exactly unpleasant either, so he stays there and lets his mind drift.

* * *

He’s broken out of his thoughts by muffled voices outside, a tinny half-echo carried from the corridor and into the room. It’s easy enough to tell who it is, Allura and Coran’s accented voices so distinct from the rest of the paladins’. They’re deep in conversation, but about what he can’t tell. He’s only able to make out one word before their voices fade.

“Shiro.”

Allura’s voice, dull and resigned, echoes in Lance’s head. The name beats against his skull, a deep and painful throb that pounds in time with his stuttering heartbeat. He pulls his knees in close, soles scraping against the unmarked metal floors until they butt up against the step he’s sitting on, and wraps his arms around them. The position is uncomfortable, but he doesn’t care – forces himself not to – as he hunches down, tucking his head down so he’s as small as he can possibly make himself. His bangs, longer now, fall into his face and brush against his eyelashes when he blinks.

He feels hollowed out as his stomach churns and the queasy feeling from earlier spreads into a sickly warmness inside him. He presses his mouth into the crook of one elbow and presses his lips together. Heat flushes his face as he digs the pads of his fingers into the soft flesh of his arm, pressing hard enough that it leaves little crescent indents where his nails dig in. He squeezes his eyes shut when they start to sting.

“Useless,” he mutters into his arm. The word is muffled in the air, but he can taste the bitterness of it on his tongue as strong as the bile rising in the back of his throat. He cracks open his eyes just enough to glare at the floor, the thin edge where the metal panels meet. He sucks in a breath, the cold, stale air in his lungs like a lifeline he’s clinging desperately to. A few breaths, in and out, help just enough that he lets his eyes droop until they close as exhaustion tugs at his eyelids. He doesn’t sleep. Can’t. Hasn’t been able to for days, maybe the whole week. 

Every time he tries, when the darkness settles over him and he feels his consciousness start to drift, he sees them. His teammates, like wraiths, draped in shadows with stricken faces as they gather around Shiro’s chair in the Black lion. He sees Shiro’s bayard, hazy as the rest of their surroundings, still in its place, and imagines he can feel it longing for its lost paladin. Every night he wakes, covered in a sheen of cold sweat and unable to drift back. Unable to settle down long enough to even nap because all he can feel is the thick, suffocating layer of grief and regret that permeates the castle in the wake of Shiro’s disappearance. 

He sits, night and day, and thinks. Thinks about how sometimes he has to physically remove himself from a room with his friends and fellow paladins inside it because all he can feel is a desperate breathlessness clawing through his chest. About how he should make an effort to help, to comfort, and how the thought makes his insides rearrange themselves, forcing a wave of nausea through him that sends him all but running to the nearest bathroom. He thinks about Pidge and Keith who were closest to Shiro – Allura and Hunk and even Coran who’d also come to bond with the black paladin, who power through their grief and console each other. Who are useful to each other, if nothing else.

He thinks about himself. How inept he seems to be at both grief and comfort. Questioning why he grieves for a man he argues he hardly knew. Shiro, his hero, his leader, his ideal. Shiro, who favors Keith and Pidge and, he thinks, everyone but him. He, who can’t even find one paladin and check up on him like he’d intended to. To be useful for once this week and not just the seventh wheel. Sixth, now that Shiro is missing, but Lance winces at the thought and shoves it quickly away. 

He sighs, runs his fingers, frustrated, through unwashed hair. He feels pressure build behind his eyes, burning despite being closed, and bites the inside of his cheek in an effort to stave off the tears he feels gathering. He shifts, moves so his hands cover his flushed face, digging the heels of his palms against his eyes hard enough that he sees red spots blot into the darkness behind his lids. He does it harshly, pressing his face down into his hands and his hands further into his face like he’s trying to will himself flatter, but no amount of pain will seal the cracked dam he’s carefully constructed for himself. 

The first sob escapes, half choked behind still-pressed together lips. Another bubbles up in his throat, and another until they come nonstop and force their way through until he’s openly crying. His face is a mess, a mix of tears and snot smeared under his palms, on his curling fingers as they slowly move to grip and tug at his hair. The dam breaks. His voice is hoarse and inconsistent, sobs broken up by pitiful hiccups that jerk his body up and down, out of place when all he wants is to keep himself contained. He finds he can’t ball himself up enough, constantly moving, making himself smaller – elbows digging into ribs and chattering chin against aching knees. 

He doesn’t hear the door when someone else enters. Doesn’t notice them until they speak, not too far from him but not close enough to touch him either. “Lance?” The startled voice is so painfully, obviously, Keith’s and that realization makes something dark and twisting curl around his gut and _squeeze_. He shakes his head, clamping one hand over his mouth in a vain attempt to quiet his gross, hiccuping sobs. 

“G-go a-a-away,” Lance stutters out, muffled through his hand. Keith steps closer, skirts around Lance until they’re almost facing each other and Lance reacts by hunching down further, ignoring the sharp pain along his spine as he curls in farther than he ever has before. A few fat tears drip from his eyelashes onto his knees, leaving dark stains on his jeans. He sniffles, rubs his eyes with the sleeve of his jacket.

“Lance, what’s wrong?” Keith hesitates, takes a step forward and leans over slightly, but stops himself before he can reach out to touch Lance. His hand hovers in the gap between them, unsure and unseen by Lance.

“Nothing!” Lance spits the word out, shriller than he’d meant it to be, and turns away from where he can feel the heat of Keith’s body.

“C’mon,” Keith starts and Lance hates that he can hear genuine concern in Keith’s voice. “Lance just … just tell me what’s wrong.”

Lance tries to force his voice into some semblance of normality, but instead accomplishes the opposite. “It’s nothing, so go away. _Please_.”

“No.” Keith throws a weight into the word that surprises Lance, makes him lift his head and open his teary eyes enough to look at Keith’s blurry face. “Not until you tell me what’s wrong.” Lance blinks, slow and owlish, but can’t hold Keith’s gaze for long, blurry or not, and looks away.

“Nothing’s wrong.”

“You’re crying,” Keith says, accusing. 

“Am not,” Lance shoots back in his cracked, scratchy voice.

“Lance I am literally right in front of you.” Lance imagines Keith rolling his eyes, but doesn’t turn and confirm his suspicion. Continues instead to stare at the slate wall behind Keith. “You’re obviously crying.”

“Sh-shut up.”

Silence stretches between them. Lance almost starts to think he’s won, that Keith will leave him alone like wants Keith to do. Like he’s sure Keith wants to do. Lance jerks in surprise when, instead, Keith walks slowly over to Lance and sits, close enough that their shoulders brush. Lance feels his stomach tighten when their shoulders touch, thinks maybe he’s going to throw up so he decides to focus on other things. His snotty and tear-stained face, his irregular breathing. Anything but Keith sitting next to him, silent. 

Warmth floods through Lance’s arm, as if transferred from Keith’s body into his cold one. He feels one of Keith’s hands move, pressing into and rubbing small circles in his back. Soothing motions that both make Lance’s skin crawl from both the familiarity and foreignness of it. No one’s done that for him since he left Earth with the other paladins. Since before the Garrison, before he left home to study and become a pilot. He bites his lower lip hard, chews it between his teeth when thoughts of Earth and home, of family, draws him into another bout of tears and quiet, half-subdued sobs. Keith still doesn’t speak, kneads his fingers into Lance’s skin through the fabric of his clothes, and waits.

“I’m sorry,” Lance pipes up suddenly, voice unsteady.

“Sorry?” Lance can picture the furrow between Keith’s brows and feels a laugh bubble up between his dying sobbing hiccups that never makes it past his lips. “Why are you sorry?”

“I-I’m supposed to be com-comforting you. N-not the other way around.” Keith’s hand comes up to rest on the back of Lance’s neck, and Lance feels Keith tug. Lance obliges, turns his head and stares at Keith’s mouth, unable to meet the other’s intent, purple gaze.

“What? Why?”

Lance hesitates for a few seconds, then, “Because you’re the one who lost someone. You and Pidge, Allura and Hunk, Coran. Not … Not me.” He sags, sniffles. 

Keith’s hand goes rigid on the back of Lance’s neck, lips thin as he presses them together. There’s a beat of tense silence when Lance tries to pull away, opens his mouth to apologize, convinced he’s said the wrong thing. Before he gets a chance, however, Keith’s hand is moving again, down to Lance’s shoulder as the other moves toward his face. For a half second, Lance expects to be slapped, braces himself against a sting of pain that never comes. Keith’s hand rests on his cheek, cupping it so his thumb brushes just under one of Lance’s deep-blue eyes. 

Lance stills, tense and hyper aware of every part of Keith as the red paladin shifts closer. Their eyes meet – Keith won’t let him look away – and Lance sees Keith struggle with something. Lance wants nothing more than to pull away, run away, but forces himself to sit there and wait. He prepares himself for the worst as Keith speaks, voice hushed and possibly hurt, but Lance can’t figure out why that would be.

“Lance,” Keith hisses, and hearing his name makes him wince as tears gather again in his eyes. Keith’s thumb swipes away a tear that slips loose. “Lance, you lost someone too.”

The words reverberate in Lance’s head, and then the tears are flowing freely again. Keith shifts, draws one leg up onto their level so there’s a gap between his legs that he ushers Lance into. Lance tries to cover his face, to hide again, but Keith is more insistent than before. He pulls Lance in close, arms wrapping around Lance’s shoulders as his head presses into Keith’s chest. Keith strokes his back for a long time, as Lance cries into and pulls at his shirt, but he doesn’t mind the noise or the mess. 

At some point Keith feels his own eyes sting, his vision blurring as unshed tears gather in his own eyes, furiously held back since the day Shiro disappeared. He squeezes his eyes shut, lets out a watery breath, and tries to stamp it down, but it’s no use. Keith curls forward, hiding his face in Lance’s messy, brown hair and holding him tighter. Lance responds in kind, tentatively wrapping his arms around Keith’s waist, pulling closer, offering his own shaky comfort.


End file.
